Ethics of Description - The Anthropological Dispositif and French Modern Travel Writing

This is a longitudinal study that treats the trajectory of ethical discoveries about the European representation of world peoples across more than one hundred and fifty years (1860-2010). This study integrates literary representation and visual representations of world peoples—images—to show in greater detail how trends of the portrayal of race and culture are manifest across artistic and scientific genres. This study integrates the history of anthropology, trends in current anthropological research, and literary representation to argue for a holistic, interdisciplinary approach to understanding the French history of the representation of world peoples. This study argues that subjectivity and objectivity are interdependent terms, and that out of this interdependence, a phenomenon called ethnographic aesthetics. This study argues that the anthropological dispositif emerged in the colonial-modern era and has shaped the French representation of world peoples through tropes, ideology, observational practice, and discursive clichés inherent in proto-anthropological and modern anthropological thinking from the nineteenth century to today.